Companies acquire talent ;Companies acquire products with a fast-growing usage base ;Companies acquire products that can help them beat competition in a fraction of the time it would take to build internally (in decreasing order of "real value" and increasing order of self-deception)

I feel its less about the tech and more about the stage Meta and Conductor are in, right now

These were true in pre-LLM era. Cursor is a good example. Big numbers but what is the value in a year?

Sure they had a lot of growth but when there are a 100 alternatives, each offering something a bit different, then user bleed is natural.

Meta, Google and all big co will spend more $ short-term to buy and they will continue to bleed till the new playbook sets in the minds of execs.

talent it is then;

both acquihires and products will get cheaper, could the new playbook be the OG marketplace ?

In this case they're shutting down the product, so it's definitely not for the product or for the user base.

That's not necessarily true. They can be using it to jumpstart their own desktop app.

I don't see a Muse desktop app, this gives them something they can spin up in a few weeks, not months, with native cloud integration. I'd guess we're going to see a product competing with OpenAi/Anthropic (as far as standalone apps are concerned) by January.

You mean that desktop app is not something I can spin up in days with my tiniest of LLM budgets?

I do not know where people are lost these days. I build ambitious apps with 3x $20 subscriptions. And I live in a village in eastern Himalayas. People are really in a bubble.

LLMs have crushed the idea of "using [another product] to jumpstart" anything. Just build it.

Yes you can build it in a single prompt, but you miss the 93 versions of iterations and thoughts of the developers who've already made the project. If you have the money, why not buy a product/team that already has a year of experience with real users instead of reinventing the wheel?

That is your assumption. I am not talking about one-shot. I mean that lots are people are going through more iterative development cycles than ever in the history of software. Just my own examples (100% agent written)

https://github.com/brainless/nocodo, https://github.com/brainless/dwata, https://github.com/brainless/akar, https://github.com/brainless/baho

All these and more, from a single engineer with 3 x $20 subscriptions. While I also run chicken and pig farms. It will take time for people outside tech hubs to understand what LLMs enable.

Not that I don’t think there’s amazing things that can be built easier, but designing and building a product is more than writing the code. Look at where you spent effort for your own examples. There’s a skill there which goes further than just reverse engineering an existing solution, and that skill is obviously of value to Meta. People were going crazy for the price they paid for instagram some years ago I remember.

Here's a quote to think about. LLM's are great, but they're only one part of the recipe:

“Anyone could make a videogame last week, anyone could make a videogame five years ago... nothing has changed.”

100%. I'm seeing it as a repeat of the VS Code fork wars. Funnily enough, nobody won that war

Companies also acquire data, and then discard the 'talent'.

Or they’re just getting rid of the competition.

I mean okay but you're looking at two very different things. At your description, it makes no sense to acquire your business. But Conductor is not building for a niche audience and is a radically different beast. Even before this acquisition they raised over 20 mil. You're using very naive thinking when you're talking about value here, its not as simple as why buy a company when someone can vibecode it. This is particularly funny because its usually AI labs that are following through with some of the biggest buys lately.

Why do you think how I am building is not going to be the norm? Software is going the way of plumbing. Pick a tiny niche, build highly customized workflows and sell to them. Global products finding audience across 100 countries is no longer working.

Raising money was not an indicator of value before LLMs but it helped a lot. I have been tech lead of a couple US based seed-funded startups and I definitely see the value.

But most software has no intrinsic hard engineering these days. A few do. Companies raise money because they feel they will grow into a large user-base. Then, either make money or get acquired. Where is "value" here? Its VC-speak all the way.

Privately funded AI labs in the US are buying, yes. I highly doubt this trend will go on when the return on investment starts fading. There is momentum in executives. The "value" is how they used to see things. Takes time to update.

Nobody's wrong or right. It's just comparing apples to bananas.

They don't need your prompts. Ideas have never been hard to come up with.

The hard work is in building something over years, supporting customers who want something you don't, persuading people to trust you and pay money for things, making hard choices to keep a product on track, etc.

None of these things are any easier, as you'll find out if you try to sell the things you have made. The first step is the easiest and it's hard to stick with things.